Editorial strategy

Most sites publish their content. Fewer publish how they decide what to publish. This page is the second thing. It's here so a reader, a journalist, or a search engine can check our work: what this site is for, what it will and won't cover, how a page earns its place, where our facts come from, and how we handle the fact that the psychiatrist who reviews this site also runs a clinical practice we sometimes point to.

What this site is

Shrinktionary is the plain-language definition layer of The Shrink Network. Its one job is to answer "what does this mental-health or psychiatry term mean?" clearly and credibly, then send you to the resource that owns the full topic. It's built to be read in seconds, not to hold your attention.

Who it's for

Someone who ran into a word, in a chart, an article, a conversation, a medication guide, a workplace document, or a search result, and needs a straight answer without wading through an essay.

What we own, and what we hand off

We write concise definitions of psychiatric, psychological, symptom, treatment, and medication vocabulary, plus common abbreviations and the informal language people actually use. We deliberately don't write full condition guides, drug monographs, treatment plans, or clinical service pages. When you need the deeper version, we send you to the site that does it properly:

• Shrinkopedia for the full concept, symptom, condition, and treatment explanations.
• PsychiatryRx for how a specific medication works, dosing, and side effects.
• AnxietyResource for practical, day-to-day guidance for anxiety.
• DepressionResource for practical, day-to-day guidance for depression.
• AnxietyResearch for research translation, evidence summaries, and data.
• shrinQ for structured self-guided work on a pattern.
• shrinkiatry for how the psychiatry profession and psychiatric care actually work.
• shrinkMD for clinical evaluation and psychiatric care, as one option among many.

This separation is on purpose. A network of focused sites, each doing one job well, serves a reader better than one site trying to be everything. It also keeps us from competing with our own sister sites for the same page.

How a page earns its place

We don't publish a page just because a keyword has traffic, a competitor has one, or a topic is broadly mental-health-related. Every entry has to clear a simple test: does it add something the current search results don't, is this the right site in the network to own it, and does it avoid duplicating a page we already have? A word that fails those isn't a page. One canonical page per concept, no duplicate entries for plural, spelling, or word-order variants.

The evidence standard

Medical claims are researched before they're published, from primary and authoritative sources: clinical practice guidelines, systematic reviews, FDA labeling, government and public-health bodies such as the NIMH and MedlinePlus, and peer-reviewed research. We don't cite marketing pages, unsourced blogs, competitor content, or AI-generated references. Every entry lists its sources, shows when it was published and last reviewed, and is re-reviewed on a quarterly cycle. We never display a medical-review statement unless a qualified reviewer actually reviewed the entry. You can read the full process in our editorial standards, sources, and medical review pages.

How care routing works

Some entries point toward professional care, because "how do I actually get help?" is a fair question to have after reading. When we do, we do it honestly. Our finding care page lays out the real options in a sensible order: primary care, a therapist, a psychiatrist, telepsychiatry, and crisis lines. shrinkMD, the clinical practice founded by our medical reviewer, appears there as one option among many, clearly disclosed. We take no referral or affiliate commission for any care, we don't describe shrinkMD as the best choice, we always name the alternatives, and we never imply that every reader needs treatment. Where a relationship exists, we state it plainly rather than hide it. The details are on our disclosures page.

Independence

Shrinktionary runs no advertising, earns no referral revenue, takes no payment for placement, and accepts no pharmaceutical funding. What goes in an entry is an editorial decision made on the evidence.

The machine-readable spine

We publish the same structure in a form a search engine or AI assistant can read directly: the canonical concept graph at /concepts.json, the full page registry at /index.json, our downloadable resources at /downloads.json, and a plain-language machine briefing at /llms.txt. Every concept ID in the network traces back to a Shrinktionary slug, which is what lets the whole network share one graph rather than a dozen disconnected glossaries.

This page is medically and editorially reviewed by Shariq Refai, MD, MBA, FAPA, and part of The Shrink Network's shared editorial standard.